


maybe and kind of

by nysscientia



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Allison Argent, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Future Fic, Magical Lydia Martin, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Reunions, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 19:05:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3661548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nysscientia/pseuds/nysscientia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And it’s Lydia.  Of course it’s Lydia disappearing act Martin.</p>
<p>Two and half years– one quarter of a <i>decade</i>– since anyone’s heard from her, and apparently she’s been in the exact same business as Stiles and Allison the whole time.</p>
<p>She dropped off the grid right after graduation.  Took a gap year, sent everyone postcards from Ireland in her gorgeous, loopy cursive, and then effectively disappeared.</p>
<p>Not, like, Cora Hale levels of disappeared– she keeps in contact with Scott, enough to still be associated with his pack, and she FaceTimes with Allison at regular intervals, but– it pretty much felt to Stiles like she’d evaporated.  Which was a lot less distressing than he would’ve expected, actually; he had shit to do in the meantime.  College, dorm life, picking a major; coping with the Nemeton and learning to channel his spark; the weird phase with DJing; reconnecting with Allison when she came back from France, starting their consulting business, their private campaign to root prejudice out of hunter society: idle hands were not Stiles’ issue.  But after Peter Hale Round Two during senior year, and everything Lydia went through– there was a part of him that would never not worry.  So.</p>
            </blockquote>





	maybe and kind of

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt by [swimthroughthefires](http://swimthroughthefires.tumblr.com/), who put up with me taking absolutely forever.

Allison comes home with pad thai and word from a hunter collective upstate, and Stiles gives up on his homework altogether.

They never did replace their coffee table with something taller, so they sit on the floor, Allison curling her toes into the stained carpet and Stiles trying really hard not to drop noodles everywhere.

“–so they want us on for the spring,” she finishes, talking around shallots and tofu. She makes talking with her mouth full seem graceful, somehow. Stiles is still kind of mad she brought him chopsticks and not a fork, but not enough to go into the kitchen and actually get any silverware of his own.

“Aren’t they just dealing with, like, a handful of wraiths?” he asks. “Why do they need us consulting?”

Shrugging, she sets down her box of takeout and pulls a folder out of her satchel. Allison rifles through papers with one hand, still eating with the other, and Stiles refrains from throwing his chopsticks at her head.

“Won’t work directly with mages,” she explains. “Kind of old-fashioned, still. The fact that they came to me might be a step in the right direction.”

“But this means–”

“That I’m gonna have to do most of the face time on this one, yeah.”

Stiles nods, flips open his laptop. “So what are they looking for, then? Protection charms? Undead repellant?”

“Primarily identifying the wraiths, I think, but she seems ready to go for the whole shebang.”

“Who, the alpha?” Stiles asks, and Allison rolls her eyes. Hunter hierarchies don’t have consistent terminology. It’s unprofessional as fuck, but Stiles has a grand old time watching their eyes bug when he uses pack structure for reference.

“ _Inaya_ is of the persuasion that the taboos around magic are outmoded,” she answers, poking him in the side with a chopstick to accent their client’s name. Stiles yelps; she talks over him. “But the rest of the party is still warming up to the idea; that’s why she came to us. Very strategic, actually.”

Stiles jabs the touchpad a little too hard pulling up his files on wraiths. “What, get them to use magic without exposing them to mage rabies?”

“Stiles–”

“No, you’re right, I know,” he says, waving a hand dismissively. The hand still has chopsticks in it and he remembers he hasn’t finished his food. He scoops up the takeout container and shovels the rest of his pad thai into his mouth; the peppers make his eyes water. It effectively distracts him from starting the same argument he and Allison have had too many times already.

He blinks away the wetness around his eyes and notices that she’s biting her lip.

“What?” he asks.

Allison opens her mouth, shuts it, shuffles around some more papers. Then she looks him dead in the eye and says, “Probably worked out for the best that they came to us. Inaya– originally tried to contract with someone else.”

Stiles blinks. “Okay?”

“But she had to cancel the deal because it was a one-woman operation. So she’d be dealing directly with a mage.”

“Okay, is that mage secretly you? Or is she going to jump out and yell at me or something? Because you’re being weird.”

Allison laughs; it’s stupidly fond. She gets fond over the weirdest things.

“No, it’s– okay, I’m not sure, so don’t freak out.”

“I’ll be cool. I’m a cucumber. I’m gourd-level chill, now tell me, what is it,” Stiles whines.

“Well, Inaya knows I was in Beacon Hills, of course, and when she found out that was where I met you, she said– something about serendipity, that she’d be able to find another mage from the area.”

“Another what from the whatea? Another mage from Beacon Hills?”

-

And it’s Lydia. Of course it’s Lydia disappearing act Martin.

Two and half years– one quarter of a _decade_ – since anyone’s heard from her, and apparently she’s been in the exact same business as Stiles and Allison the whole time.

She dropped off the grid right after graduation. Took a gap year, sent everyone postcards from Ireland in her gorgeous, loopy cursive, and then effectively disappeared.

Not, like, Cora Hale levels of disappeared– she keeps in contact with Scott, enough to still be associated with his pack, and she FaceTimes with Allison at regular intervals, but– it pretty much felt to Stiles like she’d evaporated. Which was a lot less distressing than he would’ve expected, actually; he had shit to do in the meantime. College, dorm life, picking a major; coping with the Nemeton and learning to channel his spark; the weird phase with DJing; reconnecting with Allison when she came back from France, starting their consulting business, their private campaign to root prejudice out of hunter society; his second and much more successful DJ phase: idle hands were not Stiles’ issue. But after Peter Hale Round Two during senior year, and everything Lydia went through– there was a part of him that would never not worry. So.

So, staring at the username _notpsychic_ on a thread buried deep in a mage’s forum masquerading as an online roleplaying society is kind of an anticlimactic way to confirm that she is, in fact, still Lydia Martin. She continues to exist and do all her typical Lydia Martin things. Genius, prideful, fiercely independent things like use the internet to set up her own supernatural consulting without all of the connections that stem from being besties with one of the most famous hunters in the world.

And not bother to tell anyone that she’s healthy and sane and brilliant as ever.

Stiles sifts through her posts to see if he can find any other clues as to what she’s been working on, or how people get in touch with her. He’s honestly never thought about how he’d consult if he was on his own. He and Allison share duties pretty evenly; he does the spell stuff, they split research and legwork– and she gets the clients. Everyone who knows that some things really do go bump in the night also knows the name Allison Argent, and all the hunters know how to find her. The hunter network is actually bizarrely up on social media for people holding on to centuries-old prejudices against suprahumans of all kinds.

Lydia’s system is– well, confusing, but obviously very different. Seems like it involves a significant amount of trolling through forums like the one Stiles is on, saying just enough that the right people can figure out she’s speaking from firsthand knowledge.

Stiles opens yet another thread in which Lydia subtly corrects a misconception about banshee lore, and takes a moment to hit his head against the desk. Of course: a gap year in Ireland. Banshees.

Three hours and too many mind-numbingly stupid threads about vampires’ proclivities later, Stiles finds himself logging in to Facebook. He doesn’t use social networking sites very often– he’s in constant contact with Scott and he just texts if he needs to talk to Kira or Malia or Danny, so his online friend lists are mostly filled with people who have no idea how he really spends most of his time. But, well. He goes to Lydia’s wall. She’s cut off at least six inches of her hair; she looks– professional. Older. She’s still adorable, but she also seems kind of dangerous. It suits her.

He types up a message, sends it off before his impulse control has a chance to kick in. Then he forces himself to close his browser altogether, and tries to get some editing done. College waits for no supernatural consultant.

Forty-five minutes later, he breaks down and checks his Facebook. There’s no new notifications, but the message he wrote to Lydia has been marked “seen.”

-

It’s typical Stiles, of course. Short, aggressively unpunctuated, free of context in a way that suggests he has no real idea of what’s going on in the world, and still improbably insightful.

Lydia sets down her laptop, tucks her legs underneath herself and curls into the futon. It creaks a little; she bought new cushions and a very chic cover for it, but the frame is secondhand.

Hearing from Stiles is almost a surprise, but not quite. Her self-imposed exile from Beacon Hills could only last so long– she’s fairly certain Allison already has suspicions about how she’s spending her time. And the community of supernatural investigators and mages, while unforgivably larger than anyone let on when she was in high school, isn’t actually very big. If he hadn’t sought her out, they still would’ve crossed paths, probably within the next year.

She reminds herself that hearing from Stiles was both foreseeable and inevitable, even as she downs the rest of her coffee in one long swallow. She takes several deep breaths, counting to seven with each one, then stands and straightens her skirt.

He’s invited her to what sounds– ridiculously– like a book club for practitioners. “Invite-only, technically,” the message says, “although it’s not like anyone would really do anything without inviting you or you couldn’t just walk in anyway (I’m pretty sure security is just this dude named Troy, he’s a cool guy but his protection spells are shit) so idk but the point is you should come if you’re around.”

It would be great for networking. Right now, her work exists almost exclusively online. It’s been phenomenal for privacy; it also severely limits the jobs she can take on. Lydia is getting sick of explaining to inept hunters why their hack-and-slash approach keeps attracting shades.

She collects her empty mug and the remnants of her granola, drops the bowl in the sink. After a minute she realizes she’s incessantly tapping her nails on the ceramic and stops, steps away from the counter. She’s jittery. It’s a waste of energy.

Brewing her second K-cup, it occurs to her that she’s also kind of miffed Stiles didn’t mention her haircut.

-

Nearly a week later, Lydia pulls up outside of a frankly sad-looking used book emporium. It’s two towns over, which is why she can excuse herself that she didn’t know practitioners were meeting in its basement. But the drive also gave her a cool forty-five minutes to run through every possible worst-case scenario she can conceive of, and a few she can only picture because she lived through them in high school.

The store has a small display of young adult fantasy in one window, with a huge poster for some upcoming film, a dozen copies of the glossy new tie-in cover– and two shelves of recommended reading for people who liked it. One of them is a dated copy of Shelley’s _Frankenstein_.

She decides it can’t be all bad, and climbs out of her car.

The store is almost empty, but she can hear laughter from what might be the basement. There’s a round-faced teenager behind the counter, and Lydia considers approaching him, then remembers Stiles’ rambling comments about ‘Troy’ and pauses.

During her seconds of hesitation, something on the floor below clatters; Lydia jumps, and the teenager behind the counter winces in response to her flinch.

“You heard that?” the kid asks, and Lydia shoots him a glare.

“If I hadn’t, you’ve set yourself up for an uncomfortable conversation, haven’t you?”

The kid looks sheepish.

“Only my second week behind the counter.” When she doesn’t say anything else, he adds, “Troy said anyone who can find the meeting can go right in.”

Which addresses almost none of Lydia’s questions, but she’s not going to waste her time trying to get them answered by some high school Wicca-wannabe, so she marches downstairs with her head held high.

-

The first thing she sees when she descends into the basement is a mess of candlesticks and what she hopes are magical implements scattered across the floor; the previous noise was apparently a box of paraphernalia getting knocked down in an attempt to make room for a punch bowl.

Lydia instinctively looks for Stiles near the spill, but he’s actually on the other side of the room, chatting with a few other people she assumes are also practitioners.

He catches her gaze immediately and calls, “Lydia!”, voice way too loud for the small, unfinished basement.

She tosses her hair and allows herself to smile.

Before he reaches her, though, he notices the upturned box– just like him, not to notice the crash it made when it fell– and he winds up on his knees, picking up the debris. Feeling enormously out of place, Lydia crosses to join him. Her heels are loud on the concrete. She kneels, picks up a vial of small stones, recognizes carnelian.

Lydia turns the vial over in her hand. When she looks up, Stiles is holding out a case with three similar vials and one empty slot. She presses the carnelian into it, delicately, and he smiles at her like she’s restarted the sun.

He’s buzzed his hair again. It looks different, now that he’s grown into his shoulders.

Nothing about his expression is unusual, really, but she feels unaccountably itchy under his gaze. Then a large man with extraordinarily long hair– presumably Troy– stands, making some kind of pronouncement about the beginning of the meeting, and Lydia tears her eyes away. In his haste to gather up the rest of the mess, Stiles’ fingers brush across her wrist, and a chorus of distant screams fill her ears.

She tugs down the sleeves of her sweater and rushes to take a seat in one of the folding chairs on the other side of the room, counting all of the reasons it was idiotic to come.

-

Troy starts the meeting before Stiles has a chance to actually say human words to Lydia. She sits regally, like she’s not in one of the crappy metal chairs Troy keeps crammed in a storage closet in the basement. Her hair is short and her skirt is shorter and none of the other mages are looking at her, which he can tell means they all want to. They don’t get a lot of newcomers around here, and Lydia’s kind of impossible not to look at. She’s beautiful, obviously, but she also holds herself like she owns the room, and– well, she has one hell of an aura.

Stiles spends the first third of the meeting vibrating out of his skin. Then Senna kicks his chair, only kind of subtly, and he realizes he’s probably projecting all kinds of energy all over the place and devotes himself to focusing exercises for the remainder.

Which is likely the only reason he’s able to think cogently when Troy thanks everyone for coming and shoos them over to the refreshments table, so Stiles shoots her a grateful smile. Senna rolls her eyes, but in the way that means affection. Or reluctant tolerance, either way. When Stiles doesn’t get up right away, she waves him a half-hearted dismissal, and that’s all he needs.

Usually he’ll hang out after a meeting– talk to the other mages, see if there’s any news from the local emissaries. This time, Stiles beelines for Lydia, disregarding everything else. It’s the most familiar feeling in the world.

She’s hovering, arms tight around herself and spine wickedly straight, halfway between the folding chairs and the refreshments that Senna and the others have descended upon. She’s incandescent.

Stiles has honed his senses over the years, learned how to detect a ley line or a territory boundary, can pick out a shapeshifter from a group of human civilians at fifty feet. He always knew Lydia was special. Now, knowing how to use his spark and understanding what he feels prickling across his skin, it’s almost surreal to be in a room with her. It’s ridiculous is what it is.

So he walks over and offers to get her an instant coffee or some of Troy’s sticky punch.

-

Lydia turns down both, nose wrinkling involuntarily, and Stiles just nods. He opens his mouth, closes it and pulls out his cell, and for a second she’s worried he’s going to ask her to stay, start introducing her to the other members of the– circle. Group. Her brain shies away from the word ‘coven.’

But he just checks the time, points out it’s still early, asks if she wants to grab a drink somewhere. Lydia surprises herself by saying yes. He offers to drive; Lydia only accepts because she doesn’t know of anywhere to go that’s nearby.

She glances around the parking lot as soon as they get outside, betting with herself on which car is his, but he just leads her around the side of the building to a narrow alley. Her throat feels swollen and dry as she follows him out of the comforting sodium-yellow light of the lot, but when she turns her focus inward and listens for the roaring void that always portends death, all she gets is silence. So it’s just regular nerves, then. She clenches her jaw and tips her chin up, forcing herself to walk tall.

Stiles is parked at the end of the alley, and Lydia allows herself to laugh when she sees the Jeep.

“Scott and Derek got all the claw marks out,” he mumbles, and Lydia laughs harder. He helps her climb into the passenger seat. The endorphins let her ignore the howling she hears when she braces a hand on his arm.

Two hours later, they’re still sitting at the end of a dim but very clean bar. There are only six other people in the entire restaurant; it’s Monday night in a small town. Stiles seems to notice at the same time Lydia does. He shifts in his seat, runs his hands over his buzzed head, and Lydia downs the rest of her vodka tonic in one long pull. The gesture and the fidgeting are pitch-perfect high school Stiles, but the reason she notices is because he was sitting still, before, totally intent on the conversation. It’s too much.

Stiles interrupts her internal debate about whether to order another drink by checking the time again, this time with a cringe.

“I have a paper due Friday,” he says, apologetic.

They stand at the same time, Lydia feeling a little unsteady. Not from the drink she’s been nursing; from– the whole evening, evidently.

He gives her a ride back to the parking lot, pulls up right next to her car. It’s the only one in the lot, now. The bookstore is dim behind them.

Lydia takes a second to gather her keys and cell before getting out of the car, hand flitting over the charms and knife she keeps in the zippered pocket of her purse, and by the time she’s gotten her things and climbed out of the Jeep, Stiles is right there. He gives her a quick hug, friendly. Platonic. It’s all so casual that Lydia takes his phone, dials her own number before she has time to reconsider.

“Sounds like you still don’t have any other banshees in your network,” she explains. Totally professional.

Stiles grins.

“Still an original,” he agrees, and the compliment doesn’t feel anything like they did in high school.

-

Stiles saves the number, of course, but he doesn’t call. It’s enough that she came, that he could reach her if he really needed to. That she could reach him. She’s obviously doing well on her own. More than well. But he feels better knowing.

He gets an A- on his paper, collects a few more early 80s samples for his next DJ set– just a campus gig, nothing major– forgets and then remembers to pay Allison back for buying dinner three nights in a row.

Close to two weeks later, Stiles is upside down on the futon, hoping vaguely that Allison will bring him the remote before Netflix’s autoplay steals another hour of his life– and his phone rings. His body reacts way faster than his brain and he ends up in a heap on the floor, probably with a coffee-table-corner-shaped bruise. But the point is that he also has his cell phone.

And that the caller ID says ‘Lydia Martin.’

They talk for a grand total of four minutes; she asks him about barriers against shades vs. ghouls, and he emails her a PDF excerpt of some old books and his personal notes. She thanks him and hangs up before he can reply.

But she called.

-

They’re actually what Stiles would comfortably refer to as “in contact,” after that. Lydia calls almost once a week, answers when he texts her, points him toward another useful subforum deep in weird internet land. Once, while Stiles is researching, papers spread all over the kitchen floor, Allison marches in and sets her laptop down right on top of the book he’s cross-referencing from.

“Lydia wanted to say hi,” she announces, and leaves. Stiles pretends not to notice how smug she looks about it.

The conversation is kind of stilted– it’s weird, seeing Lydia through the blue of Allison’s Macbook screen, what must be her apartment in the background. Her hair is piled on her head in what he’s sure she would call a ‘messy bun’ and most people would call ‘a masterpiece.’ But her smile, small as it is, seems genuine. Stiles starts to think of her as a friend again.

And maybe he starts to remember why he was head over heels in love with her, too, but that’s whatever. The feeling settles in behind his sternum, familiar and full, but it’s light this time. So seeing her picture on his phone screen makes him all tingly; it’s just nice, adoring her. Respecting her. It doesn’t hollow him out and make him feel desperate, suffocated like it used to. It’s not even embarrassing. It’s kind of a non-issue.

Allison nods when Stiles explains this, and she doesn’t even do the scary skeptical eyebrow face. He thinks this must be what equilibrium feels like.

And then, well, the wraiths happen.

-

Lydia can’t contract with everyone she comes across on the forums, of course– but when it comes to the undead she tries to keep tabs, even when money and contact info don’t actually change hands. As a banshee, she considers it her specialty, mostly because she tries not to use words like ‘duty.’

Inaya explained why she couldn’t work with Lydia. She even managed to do so politely. But Lydia was reluctant to just forget about it, with evidence of such an enormous wraith infestation. A lot of wraiths means a lot of dead bodies– which can mean ghouls, and that’s how you get ghost towns. Unlikely, in modern times, but Lydia would feel better if the phenomenon were something more like ‘impossible.’

So, perhaps she’s been tracking the internet usage of a member of Inaya’s crew, and perhaps she’s followed the social media trail to a patch of woods three hours away from civilization. And perhaps that was a deadly mistake.

The hunters are panicked, unable to tell who’s an ally and who’s a wraith impostor, getting more frantic with each shouted argument. Lydia has two levels of nullification charms up, the second layer of which have rendered her virtually invisible to any and all sentient beings– so she’s safe. But she also has no real way to communicate with the hunters about who represents an actual threat.

Not that there’s any reason for them to trust her, anyway; to the untrained, she’s just another suprahuman, nothing distinguishing banshee from undead. And they don’t know her face, because Inaya couldn’t be bothered to push her soldiers past an archaic, useless taboo.

Perhaps Lydia is both in danger and tremendously annoyed about the whole thing.

One of the wraiths has taken on the face of Inaya’s second in command, and it’s made enough of an argument that some of the underlings aren’t sure their leader is herself anymore. The beast trains its gun on Inaya– real, human Inaya– and Lydia wraps her hands around one of the talismans. She’ll risk the stupid ghosts if she can avoid a firefight.

There’s a brilliant flash, and Lydia reflexively snaps the talisman. Her nullification falls, leaving her visible– and a familiar voice shouts her name.

A lot of chaos follows that, but in the fray Lydia takes note of a few things: the light wasn’t a gun, it was an Argent flash grenade; the wraiths look and bleed like humans, but spelled knives cut through them like butter; and the voice was, in fact, Stiles Stilinski, because he is constitutionally incapable of resisting any amount of danger or frenzy.

He waits, like a rational person, until the fight is over and the wraiths have congealed into inhuman shapes. But as soon as the last ghost falls, he’s at her side, helping her up, featherlight touches and searching gaze on her temples.

“I’m fine,” she snaps, overwhelmed. Once the fighting started she wasn’t even really in any danger; she learned how to keep out of sight, after senior year and Peter. There’s no reason for him to hover.

To her surprise, he nods and takes a generous step back. It’s easier to breath. Also a little colder.

“Stiles?” Allison calls, emerging from the shadows in the trees. “That it, do you think?”

She’s wiping a knife off against her side, cleaning the blade and doing more damage to an already hopeless sweater. She’s drenched in blood. It doesn’t look like any of it is her own.

Stiles pauses, closes his eyes. For a moment he’s more thoroughly still than Lydia’s ever seen him, and then she feels– _something_ emanate from him.

“I’m not picking up anything,” he says.

He shrugs, and turns to Lydia. “Think we’re safe?”

She brushes the hair out of her eyes. “Hell if I know, I’m not psychic.”

Which shouldn’t be funny, but they all laugh.

-

They get Inaya’s hunters home– almost all of whom manage to shake Stiles’ hand, even after watching him spell away the wraiths’ remains– and then they’re just all standing around, staring at each other, covered in forest detritus and bodily fluid and it’s high school all over again. It’s every reason Lydia left Beacon Hills.

Except that they’re all alive, and actually so are all of the other humans. So when Stiles asks if he can buy her dinner, she says yes.

Allison bows out, claiming an early-morning vidchat date with her father, and Lydia finds herself once again bundled into the old Jeep.

They go to some twenty-four hour greasy spoon. Stiles orders a full breakfast _and_ a basket of fries, and it becomes obvious immediately that he did not intend any of this as a date. Lydia spends the first three quarters of her strawberry milkshake deciding how she feels about that.

Lydia picks at her French dip– it’s good, she’d probably come back here, but she can’t settle enough to take a real bite. Stiles, meanwhile, takes a century to finish his meal. He’s solid and steady beside her, radiating magic and smelling like damp forest and diner food and cotton. Lydia taps out rhythms on the cheap plastic tabletop. She’s the fidgety one, now.

As soon as he takes his last bite of breakfast potato, Lydia dumps enough cash for both meals and a generous tip on the table and stands. Stiles looks at her, mouth still full, and she nearly rolls her eyes. She feels herself smiling instead.

He’s probably still swallowing when she grabs his hand, yanks him out of the restaurant and marches him across the parking lot.

They get to the car and Stiles makes a confused face at her.

“Lyd–” he begins, tone inquisitive, but she cuts him off with a shove against the Jeep’s passenger side door.

She’s forceful, crushing her mouth against his, but when their lips meet he just makes the softest sound.

A lot of the men Lydia’s been with get overwhelmed when she’s aggressive. They’ll claim they’re into it, but when she shoves and bites they freeze. Other guys really do like it, of course– love when she tells them what to do, when they know what she wants. Some of them just like the reassurance that they can push back and she won’t break.

Stiles, though– he doesn’t shy away, or rise to the challenge. He sinks in. The muscles under Lydia’s hands uncoil, then surge forward, enveloping her slow and sure and irresistible. His arms are like stone, fingers unbelievably long as they card through her hair, slide up her spine. It’s not like anyone Lydia’s every kissed before, even the past iteration of Stiles.

She bites his lip, and he makes a sound so low she feels it through his chest more than feels it, and suddenly they’re turned around and she’s pressed against the Jeep with her legs wrapped around his hips. Her skirt hitches up; his body feels searing hot in the night air.

She feels herself getting breathless before she realizes she’s making sound, these sighs in low, pleading tones. Stiles has pulled away from her lips to drop open-mouthed kisses down her neck. His cheekbone fits neatly against her jaw, and he mutters, “God, _Lydia_.”

And then it’s like the sound of his own voice breaks him from a reverie, and he pulls away ever so slightly. She catches one of his wrists before he moves any further, partly to keep contact and partly because he’s the only thing holding her up against the Jeep.

“Is this an adrenaline thing?” he asks abruptly. “Like, all life-affirming and shit? Because that’s cool, but I need to be sure we’re on the same page here.”

Lydia presses her lips together and takes one deep breath.

“Yes, Stiles,” she replies. “I wanted casual sex, so I went to the one person who pined after me for over a decade, before I eventually fled our shared hometown in the hopes of never seeing it again, because I am terrible at imagining the potential ramifications of my actions.”

He adjust her weight in his grip so he can pull back to look her in the eye. She’s careful not to blink too much. He tilts his head and squints.

“You’re right,” he starts.

“Of course I am,” she interrupts flippantly, because she’s not sure she wants to hear what he says next.

He disregards the tone. “Way more feasible that you know how I feel, and you don’t mind.”

Lydia leans forward to kiss him again, but he dodges neatly. Her mobility is somewhat hampered by their position. He shifts his weight into what she recognizes is a stable stance, like he’s preparing to wait for awhile.

She sigh. “Are you going to make me say it?”

“Implied is cool and all, but I’m pretty into the explicitly stated. Call it a kink.”

Since he’s holding all her weight anyway, Lydia allows herself an elaborate full-body eyeroll.

“I don’t mind,” she begins.

But then he’s already grinning, already pressing another kiss to the side of her jaw. Like that was all he wanted. Like maybe he doesn’t need her to feel the same way.

Like maybe he doesn’t strictly _need_ anything from her but her consent, and her comfort with the situation.

Lydia blinks much too quickly, trying to dispel the moisture in her eyes with as little fuss as possible.

He doesn’t really have any hair for her to wind her hands in, but she traces the nobs of his spine with her fingers and that’s even better.

“Maybe I kind of like it,” she says, soft, breathing it against his brow while he nips his way along her collarbone. “Maybe it’s kind of like how I feel, too.”

If he answers that, she doesn’t hear it– but she can feel his reply in the clumsy, smiling kisses he leaves all across her shoulders and trailing down her chest.


End file.
